A Simple Example

On January 11, 2003, thirty-four residents of the Bryn Gweled intentional community in Bucks County, PA, applied the SDP to define intentions for the future of their community.  The co-laboratory took place in the Bryn Gweled Community Center shown below.

 Content

In a one day working session, the community stakeholders generated and clarified 42 distinct intentions, such as:

• Restore the intentional diversity of the community.
• Learn to have fun together as a community.
• Encourage members to act on the saying “It takes a village to raise a child.”
• Develop effective ways of resolving disputes so that no one feels like a winner or a loser.

They subsequently voted individually and subjectively on the relative importance of the 42 intentions and selected those intentions that they thought were of higher relative importance (see below for the pattern of voting in the Collaborative facility).

In the voting, 39 out of the 42 received one or more votes from the participants. This result corresponds to a divergence in terms of preference of 91%, which is very high when compared to the average divergence from a variety of applications of SDP.  The 5 most important intentions were:

• Make the transition from our early stage of growth to one of stewardship.
• Identify better ways to improve our decision-making process.
• Re-explore ideas to allow elderly members to remain on the Bryn Gweled Homestead.
• Re-unite less active members of our community with an invitation to participate anew.
• Use our past knowledge to enlighten our future planning.

In the afternoon, the stakeholders engaged in a strategic dialogue exploring the influences among the 12 intentions that received the most votes.  The resulting Influence Tree is displayed below.

This Influence Tree-pattern is a “tree of meaning.”  Relevant to the community, the intentions at the base of the tree are the most influential ones.  If those intentions at the base of the tree were neglected, the community would be greatly handicapped in its efforts to accomplish intentions higher on the tree.  The stakeholders were intrigued by the discovery of the most influential intentions, shown in Figure 18-4, which were the following two:

• Use our past knowledge to enlighten our future planning.
• Identify ways to improve our decision-making process.

Interpreting the Influence Pattern

The implication of this discovery was that the Bryn Gweled community should focus its energy on meeting those two intentions.  If it fulfills these two most influential intentions, it will be much easier for them to accomplish the other intentions higher on the tree. In looking at the Tree, it became clear to the participants that the intentions they voted most important were not the most effective for attaining the goal.

The two other intentions that should be given serious consideration by the community, because of their positioning in the influence tree, are:

• Identify ways to involve children in the decision-making process.
• Reunite less active members of our community with an invitation to participate anew.

Conclusions

By working on the four intentions discovered during SDP dialogue, the community has already made significant progress towards accomplishing all the other important intentions shown in the Influence Tree.

The commentary at the end of the session was very positive, including statements by the stakeholders that the Influence Tree made explicit and transparent their long tradition of decision making.  The community has been using Robert’s Rules of Order for many years, and they appreciated SDP dialogue, in the sense that it enables them to have a true dialogue instead of a debate. 

In February 2005, the stakeholders revisited their earlier work by means of a dedicated “Day of Dialogue” focusing on ecosystemic issues confronting the community on account of the significant increase of the deer population.  A task force is implementing the recommendations of the second co-laboratory of democracy for this community.  One member of the community recently made the statement:

Before using this dialogue process we were experiencing a serious breakdown in terms of our capacity to sustain our traditional intentional community values and construct our future.  We are now clearly on the correct path.

Bryn Gweled Homesteads was created in 1840 to give 80 families enough land to raise their food.  “Homesteading” is no longer practiced, and the community is now completely surrounded by Philadelphia suburbs.  But Bryn Gweled has never lost sight of its founder’s dedication to cooperation, to environmentalism, and to racial, economic, and religious diversity.  This Co-Laboratory of Democracy was called to reinvigorate processes dedicated to those ideals.